Category: Business

Instilling faith in PM Narendra Modi and his policies, Commodities Guru Jim Rogers on Monday said that he should have been more patient and waited for Modi’s plan to play out before selling his positions in 2015. In a conversation with ET Now he said, “I believed that Modi did nothing but talk, hence I sold out of India. The currency and Indian markets have gone up quite a bit after I sold out”. In 2015 Rogers exited his India investments after giving up on Narendra Modi, saying that the Prime Minister has failed to meet the investors’ expectations. “Mr. Modi ran a successful state. He campaigned for two years, saying he knew what to do. He has been there 15 months, yet little has happened,” he had said in 2015, upon deciding to sell his India assets. Earlier this year, he said that he wanted to invest in India but demonetisation event happened.

Recently he also expressed his desire to enter India again. “If Modi continues doing stuff like GST, then not just me, everybody has to pay a lot more attention to India,” he said in an interview to LiveMint. He also lauded Modi for passing the crucial GST. “On GST, I am amazed, shocked and stunned,” he told the publication. The biggest tax reform since Independence, GST has been in the works for more than a decade. It will transform the $2 trillion economy and market of 1.3 billion people into a single economic zone with a single national sales tax.

GST will subsume central taxes like excise duty which is levied on manufacturing and service tax as well as state taxes like VAT that is chargeable on sale. Sources said Adhia informed the meeting of the four-slab rate structure of 5, 12, 18 and 28 per cent finalized by the GST Council. He explained how the fitment of different goods and services in these slabs is being done to keep their impact on consumers as well as exchequer neutral.

President Pranab Mukherjee approved four supporting legislations related to GST. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley along with his ministry officials presented a blueprint to the Council of Ministers for launch of the path-breaking GST from July 1 to transform the Indian economy. Revenue Secretary Hasmukh Adhia made a detailed presentation to the Council — the supreme executive organ headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi — on how the Goods and Services Tax (GST) will be implemented and the challenges before it is rolled out.

Warren Buffett is not a fan of hedge funds and the high fees they charge clients for the promise of outperformance.

“When trillions of dollars are managed by Wall Streeters charging high fees, it will usually be the managers who reap outsized profits, not the clients,” Buffett said in his annual shareholder letter published on February 25.

He added that by his rough calculation, investors have wasted about $100 billion over the past decade in the search for superior performance.

His contention is two fold: active hedge fund managers’ fees crimp returns for their clients, and the promise of outperformance falls short when stacked against the S&P 500.

In fact, the Berkshire Hathaway chairman is on track to win a $1 million bet he made in 2008 with Protege Partners that the S&P 500 index would outperform a portfolio of funds of hedge funds. In the nine years since, the best-performing fund of funds has gained 62.8%, less than the 85.4% return that the S&P 500 index fund has earned.

Buffett’s position on this is somewhat paradoxical, since Berkshire’s success is largely a result of Buffett and his team’s ability to pick stocks.

In the letter, Buffett said his favorite recommendation for investing is a low-cost S&P 500 index fund. He also said Jack Bogle , the Vanguard Group founder considered to be the father of indexing, has done the most for American investors.

“I estimate that over the nine-year period roughly 60% – gulp! – of all gains achieved by the five funds-of-funds were diverted to the two levels of managers,” Buffett said. “That was their misbegotten reward for accomplishing something far short of what their many hundreds of limited partners could have effortlessly – and with virtually no cost – achieved on their own.”

Buffett added that if passive investors in the index are destined to achieve average results, before accounting for costs, so too would active, more expensive managers. However, it’s the group with the lower costs that will win in the end, and the side with higher costs would see a more substantial shortfall.

He said,

“There are no doubt many hundreds of people – perhaps thousands – whom I have never met and whose abilities would equal those of the people I’ve identified. The job, after all, is not impossible. The problem simply is that the great majority of managers who attempt to over-perform will fail. The probability is also very high that the person soliciting your funds will not be the exception who does well.”

Warren Buffett was a paperboy

Buffett has been interested in making and saving money since he was a kid. Today, the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway is worth an estimated $69.6 billion, according to Forbes, making him one of the world’s wealthiest people.

At the age of 13, Buffett spent his mornings delivering copies of The Washington Post, according to Bio. That same year, he invested $1,200 of his savings into 40 acres of farmland.

Donald Trump collected bottles

The president-elect and billionaire real-estate mogul grew up wealthy, but he says his father wanted him to learn the value of money early on.

As a child, his father, real estate developer Fred Trump, would take him to construction sites and have him and his brother pick up empty soda bottles to redeem for cash, Trump tells Forbes.

He says that he didn’t make much, but it taught him to work for his money.

Hillary Clinton supervised park activities

Clinton writes in her autobiography “Hard Choices” that she got her first paying job, other than babysitting, at 13, supervising a small park a few miles from her home in the Chicago suburb of Park Ridge, Illinois.

The former secretary of state says she had to lug a wagon full of balls, bats, and jump ropes back and forth three days a week that summer.

“My parents believed in self-reliance and hard work, and they made sure we kids learned the value of a dollar and appreciated the dignity of a job well done,” she writes

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a research assistant for a law professor

During the Supreme Court justice’s undergraduate years at Cornell University, she worked as a research assistant for Robert E. Cushman, a constitutional law professor who first sparked Ginsburg’s interest in attending law school, according to the Jewish Virtual Library.

“He wanted his students to understand that our country was straying from its most basic values. In my years at Cornell, Senator Joseph McCarthy held sway — a man who saw a Communist in every corner, including major university faculties. The House Un-American Activities Committee and Senate Internal Security Committee were calling people on the carpet, many of them leading lights in the entertainment industry. Cushman’s point was that lawyers were standing up for these people, reminding Congress that there was a First Amendment and a Fifth Amendment. The notion was that you could be a lawyer and aim at something outside yourself. You could help to repair tears in your community.”

Madeline Albright sold bras

Albright became the first female secretary of state, serving under President Bill Clinton. She made it into the US as a political refugee from Czechoslovakia, since her anti-Soviet family was in danger from her country’s communist party, according to Bio.

She got her first job selling bras at a department store in Denver, she tells Forbes, and adds that she probably made next to nothing but learned how to deal with people in difficult situations.

Michael Bloomberg was a parking-lot attendant.

The former mayor of New York City is now worth an estimated $42.7 billion, according to Forbes, but he comes from a middle-class family.

Mark Cuban sold garbage bags

When the Dallas Mavericks owner and entrepreneur asked his dad if he could get a new pair of expensive sneakers, his dad told him he could go get a job. So he did, selling garbage bags door-to-door.

Cuban was 12 at the time, and he asked his dad how he was supposed to find a job. That’s when one of his dad’s friends stepped in. He said he had some garbage bags he needed to sell, so Cuban went door-to-door selling the bags for three dollars more than he paid for them.

Marissa Mayer was a grocery-store clerk

Mayer told Fortune that when she was 16, she took a summer job as a grocery-store clerk at County Market in Wausau, Wisconsin.

The Yahoo CEO says it was there she saw first-hand the value of work ethic, and the job taught her a lot about family economics and the trade-offs people have to make in daily life.

Lloyd Blankfein sold snacks at Yankee Stadium

As the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Blankfein is one of the most influential people on Wall Street.

Richard Branson was an amateur bird breeder and arborist

Branson, the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group, has worked for himself from day one.

At the age of 11, Branson says in a LinkedIn post, he and his best friend, Nik Powell, started breeding parakeets to sell as pets to their classmates. The birds started multiplying faster than they could sell them, so they then tried their hand in a different market.

As Christmas approached, they bought small fir trees and hoped to make a profit off them once they grew big — but rabbits destroyed the trees before they could grow, he writes.

Beth Comstock worked in a Rubbermaid factory

General Electric’s first female vice chair oversaw the creation of the Hulu streaming service. But before she entered the professional world, she learned the value of hard work at a Rubbermaid factory that produced kitchenware.

In a LinkedIn post, she explains that she took the summer job after her freshman year of college as a break from academic work but found herself completely overwhelmed. She’s still proud of learning how to work as a team to overcome the difficult months of labor.

Neil Vogel sold tuxedos in a Philadelphia mall

“Because of the commission plan, which paid no commission on basic rentals, but instead paid $10 or so every time you rented a tux with tails or a terrible vest-suspenders combo, all of our effort was spent trying to rent people the most ridiculous thing possible,” he said, admitting that he and a buddy made side bets (the stakes were lunch in the food court) based on who could rent that day’s pre-determined awful item first.

“Working retail is full of great lessons in how to deal with people, and of course sales skills are invaluable,” Vogel said. “However, given the surprising amount of money we made, perhaps the most important thing I learned is to be skeptical of those paid commissions to sell you something.”

Robert Herjavec was a debt collector

After graduating from the University of Toronto in 1984, and long before he became a celebrity investor through “Shark Tank,” Herjavec took the first job he could find as the guy calling people to pay their bills.

“If you’re thinking that being a bad-debt collector was not the best way to launch a business career, you’re wrong,” Herjavec writes in his book “You Don’t Have to Be a Shark.” “I learned a lot from the job, and some lessons — valuable lessons — stay with me today.”

Among those lessons, he says he learned that great salespeople focus energy only on serious prospects, and that empathy is often more effective than aggression when it comes to making a sale.

A star employee, at 19 she was asked by Hooters to go to Australia to help open a franchise location there, and she spent much of her early twenties training global employees and managers, Fortune reports.

“At 11 years old, I had a morning paper delivery route with the LA Examiner and I made $33 per month,” he said. “I gave the money to my mother so we could live a better life. Having a job was an honor.”

Oprah Winfrey worked at a corner grocery store.

Winfrey’s media empire made her the first female black billionaire — she’s worth an estimated $2.9 billion today, according to Forbes. Before she made it to the top, she struggled her way out of a difficult, impoverished childhood.

When she was living with her dad in Nashville as a young teenager, she worked at a corner grocery store next to her dad’s barbershop, Forbes reports.

Michael Dell washed dishes.

As founder and CEO of Dell Inc., Dell enjoyed a rise to power during the heyday of the personal computer. Today, Dell is worth an estimated $20.5 billion, according to Forbes.

But before he helped make PCs mainstream, Dell got his first job scrubbing dishes for a Chinese restaurant at the age of 12, Bio reports.

David Murdock pumped gas.

Murdock, the 91-year-old chairman and CEO of Dole Foods, turned the company into the world’s largest producer and marketer of fruits and vegetables. He’s worth an estimated $2.6 billion today, according to Forbes, but he grew up poor and dropped out of high school in the ninth grade.

After quitting school, Murdock worked at a gas station until he was drafted into the Army in 1943, Forbes reports.

Jacki Zehner sold hot dogs at hockey games

In 1996 the now CEO of the Women Moving Millions charity became the first female partner at Goldman Sachs.

Before that, she spent her early teens in Canada working the concession stand at games for her local farm team, the Kelowna Buckaroos. In a LinkedIn post, she says her time spent running a busy stand and making quick transactions proved to be perfect training for the Wall Street trading floor.

T. Boone Pickens delivered newspapers.

The chairman of hedge fund BP Capital Management showed his aggressive business savvy at a young age.

Like Buffett, Pickens was a paperboy. At the age of 12, he expanded his delivery route from 28 houses to 156 by taking over his competitor’s routes, according to Forbes. He has said that this taught him the value of expanding business through acquisition.

Jeff Bezos worked the grill at McDonald’s.

The founder and CEO of internet-retail behemoth Amazon got his start working the grill at McDonald’s during his summers as a teenager, according to the book “Golden Opportunity: Remarkable Careers That Began at McDonald’s.”

“The most challenging thing was keeping everything going at the right pace during a rush,” Bezos said. “The manager at my McDonald’s was excellent. He had a lot of teenagers working for him, and he kept us focused even while we had fun.”

Chuck Schwab sold walnuts and chickens.

Schwab founded the Charles Schwab Corporation, a brokerage and banking firm, and is today worth about $7.1 billion, according to Forbes. He tells Stanford’s alumni magazine that he had the entrepreneurial spirit from a young age.

Schwab grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Sacramento, California, but wanted to make his own money. As a kid, he bagged and sold walnuts and raised chickens in his backyard, selling some and using others for eggs to sell.

The search for a new chairman of Tata Sons following the ouster of Cyrus Mistry has thrown up quite a few names. The high-profile names include Indra Nooyi, the head of PepsiCo Inc, Arun Sarin, the former head of Vodafone Group, and Noel Tata, chairman of the Tata retail unit Trent and Jaguar Land Rover boss Ralf Speth.

Of these TCS CEO N Chandrasekaran is said to be the top contenders and below are some strong reasons for it.,

N Chandrasekaran heads the Tata Sons most Valuable Company

Chandrasekaran heads the group’s most valuable company.
And of all the chiefs of Tata companies, which is present in around 100 businesses, perhaps only JLR boss Ralph Speth can claim to rival Chandra’s performance.
Chandrasekaran has made TCS the biggest cash generator for Tata Sons contributing almost 90% to the Tata Sons coffers in 2014-15.

He is a Tata Group insider

Another thing that works in TCS CEO Chandrasekaran’s favour is that he happens to be a Tata Group insider and veteran.
TCS was his very first job. He joined the company in the year 1987 as a software programmer. He has never worked outside TCS.

TCS accounts for 60% of the Tata Group’s combined market cap

TCS now accounts for 60% of the Tata Group’s combined market cap of $116 billion, besides contributing 70% to Tata Sonsí revenue, which comes from dividends of its listed entities.

TCS has grown three-fold under his leadership

Under his leadership, TCS has jumped three fold from Rs 30,000 crore ($6.34 billion) in 2010 to Rs 1.09 lakh crore ($16.5 billion) in FY16. Profits also jumped more than three times from Rs 7,093 crore to Rs 24,375 crore.

Known for his able leadership

Chandrasekaran is said to have proved to be an able leader, often departing from established norms.
He broke down TCS business, once considered to be a monolith, into 23 business units to make service delivery, operations and execution work smoothly for the company. Later, he consolidated the units under eight groups, the heads of which report to him.
The strategy of creating small, focused business units was replicated by competitor Infosys this year.

Led the company’s biggest acquisition

Chandrasekaran has led the company to one of its largest acquisitions Citigroupís back office for $500 million in 2008. He also remains one of the youngest CEOs of the Tata Group.

TCS is India’s largest private-sector employer

The company today employs more than 350,000, making it the largest private sector employer in India. Among the listed companies, it is second largest after Coal India.

Known to take tough decisions

Spearheading TCS since he took over as CEO and MD in 2009, Chandra has shown he can take tough business decisions and challenge the status quo.

India’s debt-laden Essar Group confirmed on Saturday that it has agreed to sell a 98 % interest in its Essar Oil unit to a consortium led by Russia’s Rosneft, giving the energy giant a gateway into the world’s fastest growing fuel market.

The deal will see Rosneft, along with its partners Trafigura and United Capital Partners (UCP), pay $10.9 billion for Essar’s refining and retail assets. Separately, $2 billion will be paid toward the acquisition of the Vadinar port in the western state of Gujarat, along with certain import and export facilities.

Sources familiar with the matter had told Reuters on Friday that a deal was imminent.
It will give Rosneft a 49 % stake in Essar Oil, with 49 percent being split equally between Trafigura and UCP. The deal was carefully structured to avoid falling foul of western sanctions against Russia over its role in the Ukraine crisis.

“Rosneft will not get a controlling stake, partly because of these reasons (sanctions)”, Andrey Kostin, head of Russian lender VTB which advised Essar on the deal, told Reuters.

The deal helps Russia to deepen economic ties with India that stretch back to the Soviet era. The purchase is the biggest foreign acquisition ever in India and Russia’s largest outbound deal, according to Thomson Reuters data.
It was finalised after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Russian President Vladimir Putin met at a summit in the western state of Goa on Saturday.
The all-cash deal will give Rosneft and its partners control of Essar’s 20 million tonne refinery in Gujarat, and its retail fuel outlets in India, where growth for refined petroleum goods in the next five years is expected to be in the 5 percent to 7 percent range.

“Rosneft is entering one of the most promising and fast-growing world markets,” said its Chief Executive Igor Sechin in a statement, adding that the deal gives it “unique opportunities for synergies” with its existing assets.

Separately, Rosneft said it would use Venezuelan crude to supply the Vadinar refinery.

The closing of the transaction is conditional on receiving requisite regulatory approvals that are expected before the end of the first quarter of 2017.

The deal also reduces some of the pressure on Essar, which is controlled by the billionaire Ruia brothers. The group has a presence in oil and gas, steel, ports and power, and has been under pressure from its lenders to reduce its debt burden.

In parallel with the deal, Russian lender VTB said on Saturday it would lend Essar about $3.9 billion toward debt reconstruction.

Chanda Kochhar, chief executive of ICICI Bank Ltd – one of Essar’s top lenders – welcomed the deal, noting that it has been working closely with Essar to deleverage its stressed balance sheet.

Taj Mansingh Hotel situated in Lutyens Delhi towards the southwest of India Gate is one of the rare examples of Mughal architecture in the city. Constructed entirely out of pink Dholpur sandstone and set amidst a garden, Taj Mansingh is an epitome of luxury and indulgence and while a lot of people dream of actually living in this five-star property, one man actually made that very wish come true- that too for 37 years.

Meet Dadi Balsara, the Parsi businessman who had lived in Taj Mansingh Hotel for a whopping 36 years- becoming Taj Mansingh Hotel’s long-standing guest until he passed away in 2014 at the age of 71.

Balsara and his wife Christina Stone (who passed away in 2009) both made the Room no 901, one of Taj Mansingh’s luxury suite their home and lived and loved the hotel as his own. The couple had no children.

According to hotel sources, Balsara never felt the need of buying a house in the city as he considered Taj Mansingh as his home and the hotel staff his extended family. He not only knew the hotel like the palm of his hand, but was also incredibly close to the staff. In the course of his 36-year-long stay, he had grown close to a valet who was considered more of Balsara’s personal aide, rather than a hotel staffer.

He was also the first member of the Taj InnerCircle loyalty programme. The hotel staff also talked of how co-operative Balsara was.

“Whenever we would have a VIP guest- such as the Prime Minister or President of some country staying with us, who wanted the floor to be cleared- we would inform of him of the same and he would promptly comply with their wishes and would return only when the guest had left the hotel.”

Infact, it was Balsara who had set up the largest natural mineral water plant in Dhaula Kaun in Himachal Pradesh in with an investment of $20 million and created the niche Himayalan mineral water brand. Manufactured by his Mount Everest Mineral Water Limited, he ensured that Himayalan stands out in the highly competitive bottled water segment in the country.

And, as luck would have it, taking his association with the hospitality brand one step closer, he sold off his priced asset, the Himalayan brand to none other than the Tata Group in 2007. This marked Tata Global Beverages foray into the Indian packaged water segment.

Contrary to popular belief, Balsara was not born a billionaire. He was born into a family of modest means and began his career as an LIC officer in Nagpur, earning a meager salary of Rs 600. He later went on to the US to study psychiatry on a scholarship and started his own practice after obtaining a doctorate.

Unfortunately, he was forced to look at other career options when his practice failed as hardly anyone turned up for a consultation.
His big break came when a Japanese television channel decided to host his ‘holistic lifestyle’ programmes which as time passed became a roaring success and finally money started to roll in.

It was only uphill from there. Balsara later settle in Singapore where he earned the title of ‘Perfumes king of Asia’ by selling perfumes. In 1991 he decided to come back to India and settled in Delhi.

With a business empire spread across 63 countries, Balsara was one of the richest NRI at the time of his death. He reportedly had Rs 250 crore in his bank account.

2014: Lenovo buys Motorola from Google for $2.9 billion

After losing more than $2 billion in less than two years, Google sold Motorola’s smartphone business to the Lenovo Group for $2.9 billion. However, it held on to the patents.

2014: Facebook buys WhatsApp for about $21.8 billion

The social media giant expanded its reach into messaging apps with the acquisition of WhatsApp.

2012: Google buys Motorola Mobility for $12.4 billion

The search giant surprised everyone with its acquisition of Motorola. Google is said to have acquired the company largely for its portfolio of 17,000 mobile patents.

2011: Hewlett-Packard buys Autonomy for about $10 billion

Computer maker HP aimed to bolster its software and services offerings with the buyout, but the deal blew up quickly amid allegations that Autonomy had misled HP about its sales. HP absorbed an $8.8 billion charge to reflect that Autonomy wasn’t worth the price HP paid for it.

2011: Microsoft buys Skype for about $8.5 billion in 2011

The software giant bolstered its online video calling services with the buyout of Skype.

2010: Oracle buys Sun Microsystems for $7.4 billion

The buyout gave Oracle ownership of the Java programming language and catapulted the software company into the hardware business. Analysts have been generally unimpressed with the payoff that Oracle has gotten from Sun Microsystems so far.

The computer maker aimed to bolster its technology consulting services, but HP has had trouble retaining customers. After HP’s 2015 split, EDS became part of HP Enterprises. Last month, the company said it would shed the former EDS operations as part of an $8.5 billion deal to sell its business services division to Computer Sciences Corporation.

2005: Symantec buys Veritas for about $13.5 billion

The security software company expanded its storage software capabilities with the purchase. This deal turned out to be another mismatch, culminating in Symantec’s decision last year to sell Veritas for $8 billion to the Carlyle Group and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, GIC.

2005: Oracle buys PeopleSoft for $11.1 billion

The purchase of human resources software maker turned Oracle into a more formidable rival to SAP in the market regarding business management applications. In recent years, Oracle has been contending with a new threat from Workday, a specialist in online personnel services that was started by PeopleSoft founder David Duffield.

2002: Hewlett-Packard buys Compaq for about $19 billion

This deal was championed by then-CEO Carly Fiorina as a way for HP to become a stronger rival to computer maker IBM, but it faced staunch resistance from some prominent shareholders, including some of the heirs to HP’s founders.

The acquisition helped in establishing HP as the largest maker of personal computers for many years, but the deal has lost its lustre as sales of desktop and laptop machines decline with the growing popularity of smartphones and tablets. Last year, HP split into two companies, one focused on serving businesses and the other on selling PCs and printers.